


rage, rage

by greywash



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Episode s04e13 - The Seam, Fandom Meta - Freeform, See Story Notes for Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-15 21:49:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18507757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: Another DW crosspost, this one more or less in real-time:This still isn't even really everything I have to say, but—The Magicians04x13 spoilers, which probably, lbr, is going to apply to everything I post for the next 48 hours minimum, so. Related content warnings apply;please see story notes for warnings.Originally posted—right around midnight rolling over into 2019.04.18,to Dreamwidth.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: **consent issues, abuse, trauma** , and an extremely strong warning for **discussion of suicide and suicidal thoughts and behaviors**.

So—it's late. It's 11:30. And I watched _The Magicians_ 4x13, and then I sat up way past our bedtimes with **breathedout** , talking about sort of the—the particular parts of this plotline that bother me, and I cried a lot. I'm not suicidal right now, I don't anticipate being suicidal in the near future. I'm mentioning that here because—sometimes that's a thing I have to say, when I'm sad. Because sometimes it helps me to say it, and to know that people are listening to me say it, and it helps the people who love me to know that too. I will never, ever say that, for the record, unless it's true. I am not suicidal right now.

But I have been.

Talking about stuff like this in a fannish context can be so hard, because there's all these layers, right? In the experience of watching something as a fan. There's the layer of me that consumes media because I'm a writer, and I'm interested in stories, and the mechanics of stories, and in how people get stories to do what they want them to do; and there's another layer that consumes media because I just—love stories, and I love what stories can do to me, how they can sort of—purify and refine me emotionally, experiencing a story. Catharsis, right? Those Greeks were onto something. But yeah. I watch stories, always, with at least two minds: one is thinking about how the story works; and the other is absorbing what it's doing.

I'm also a person who really profoundly relates to Quentin Coldwater, kind of—outside this issue of suicidality. For a really long time, I was a self-absorbed, whiny, annoying little twit (arguably, in many ways, I still am). I also spent my teens and twenties feeling profoundly disconnected from the world in ways that are—very, very hard for me to talk about, in part because they're emotionally difficult and still cause me pain and in part because they're just so fucking _embarrassing_. Like Quentin, I had (slash have) a smallish number of things in which I am interested to a degree that is often uncomfortable or distasteful to the people around me, and my ability to not be absorbed in those things is—inconsistent at best. Like Quentin, I find it difficult to relate to other humans unless they come towards me with an almost immeasurable degree of patience and tolerance for me being an awkward hand-knit tube sock used to disguise a badly-built robot as something approaching a person, a degree of patience and tolerance that I didn't (and often still don't) know how to accept. Like Quentin, I spent a lot of time taking abuse from someone—multiple someones—that I loved because I didn't know any better and it seemed like that was what was happening. Like not just Quentin but a _lot_ of depressed people, I had— _have_ —almost no ability to recognize when I'm actually feeling sexual desire. Like Quentin, I was also very, _very_ pretty—no, sorry, in addition to being a girl, I was actually way hotter than Quentin (sorry, Quentin, but I showered), but—: _like_ Quentin, I was pretty, and I looked young for my age, and there was, for a very, very long time, something about me that made me look, in particular, _vulnerable_ ; and let me tell you: when you are a small big-eyed soft-mouthed young-looking bisexual bonbon, you are a magnet for a particular set of creeps and assholes, all of which intersected with my basic total lack of familiarity with the concept of "boundaries" in some very, very Quentin Coldwater ways. I have been sexually assaulted more than once (though I've never been raped). It mostly took me literal years to realize that what had happened to me actually was assault, because I basically didn't feel anything about it at the time. When someone actually _did_ try to rape me, I got lucky and it didn't work; but I then defended my would-be rapist _so assiduously_ from social censure that it warped and perverted every social connection I had, and also came very close to destroying my professional life. Basically: a guy I trusted tried to rape me and I spent the next year trying to keep him from losing friends. I also have just let a lot of people fuck me because it seemed like it'd be rude to say no.

I am, also, not neurotypical. 

I am, also, mentally ill. 

I have, also, spent a nontrivial part of my life suicidally depressed.

So. Point: Q. Coldwater is—very recognizable to me. In a _hell_ of a lot of ways, I sort of wish he wasn't. And I don't— _like_ Quentin, really; I feel sort of—*sigh* _fond_ of him, I guess, but he is such an avatar for parts of myself that I really struggle to accept and to love that it can be very hard to just— _enjoy_ him, the way I enjoy an equally-disastery-but-not-quite-as-much- _me_ character like Eliot. 

When it comes to something like 4x13, I'm really, really aware that all these parts of me are sort of—watching the show together. So, like, I'm watching the show as a writer, and thinking about how all the pieces fit together; and watching as just like—Jane Viewer on the street, who's really into _The Magicians_ ; but I'm also watching—someone who isn't me, but who _feels_ like me, in whom I see a lot of—disordered shit that I have been and done and thought and felt, living through all the things that happens to that character on _The Magicians_.

At some point when I've slept and processed some more or whatever I'll go through and link these but—I've written, this season, a number of times, about how Quentin is being abused by the Monster and how his abuse by the Monster parallels the way he was abused by niffin!Alice; and how I think that, whatever he was "supposed" to learn, what the Key Quest actually taught Quentin was that he needed to put aside love as something that he could accept for himself. And I marked Quentin as the character who was going to die _quite_ early in the season: first privately, with **breathedout** , and then since we hit 04x07 and later, I haven't thought there was conceivably any other way they could go and I started saying so publicly on the internet. But—however aggressively they set this up, however far in advance they telegraphed it—I still have spent the past thirteen weeks watching a character who looks like me, who _feels_ like me, be traumatized by relentless physical and emotional torture by someone with the face and eyes of someone he loves, following on a season of him learning to cut himself off from life and joy, following on a season of being traumatized by relentless physical and emotional torture by someone with the face and eyes of someone he loves; and then decide to kill himself.

Because: he did kill himself. Just because they lampshaded it, just because he did find a way to do it saving hs friends, that doesn't change that he killed himself. Quentin spent two seasons being relentlessly traumatized and abused, _by people he loved_ , who he couldn't say no to, who he couldn't get away from, who he didn't, even, at any point seem to indicate that he _understood_ that in an ideal world, he would say no to, or get away from; he went on a quest that taught him to isolate himself from companionship and affection and love; and then he killed himself.

I think, in some ways, what bothers me the most about the the execution of 4x13 (and, _inextricably_ woven up with that, 4x12), is that I think their handling of Quentin's mental health is, in the light of 4x12-4x13, just—cheap. It's just cheap. What bothers me about it isn't that it's fucking—#problematic, or clueless, or whatever; it's that it's cheap.

Like—the thing I keep coming back to, with **breathedout** , and in my own mind, is that—these are issues that I think the writers' room—at least some people in the writers' room—understands. There have been so many moments where mental illness is handled with such nuance—Julia's ongoing PTSD, the way that Quentin's depression rises and falls but never really leaves him; the way that Margo and Eliot's friendship is inflected by Eliot's drug and alcohol abuse, and Margo not knowing how to deal with that—that I can't say that the writer's room doesn't get trauma, or understand how to write mental illness, or understand that it's something that merits thought and attention. They do understand mental illness. They clearly know that writing mental illness merits thought and attention and care. 

So then—the thing that I'm left with, then, is that they know that, and they understand that, and they still wrote a clinically depressed boy spending about two years being traumatized, abused, isolated, abused, and traumatized; and then they wrote him killing himself. "But it's okay!" they shout. "He did it saving his friends!" But that doesn't make it okay. It doesn't mean that he wasn't, in that moment, processing shit very, very poorly, due to the aforementioned relentless trauma and assault and abuse. _In fact_ , because of the way that scene is filmed, when Quentin has fucking _ages_ to throw the bottle before Everett attacks: they specifically framed and constructed that scene so that _Quentin Coldwater did not need to die_. But—he still did die, didn't he. "But it's okay!" they shout. "We talked about why it wasn't suicide!" But that doesn't make it _better_ , because it **was** suicide. They _know_ it was suicide. You fucking _know_ that he killed himself. _That is why they had to write the last twenty minutes of that episode_. So you had a badly traumatized mentally ill bisexual kid kill himself unnecessarily, and then you spent 20 minutes gaslighting dead!him, over whether or not he'd actually done _the thing he most feared when he was alive_.

It's—so late, God, I am getting up in five hours, but—when you're depressed, when suicidal fucking depression is just—something that lives with you, the fear that you're going to do something irrevocable when you're extra sick is like—it really is just like another person who lives inside you, wearing your face and just—talking to you, sometimes pretty fucking relentlessly, in a voice you hate and you recognize. (This is what I mean, about them—pretty clearly understanding mental illness, what mental illness does, and how mental illness works.) And it's so, so scary, to know that you have—a traitor, _a traitor who is made up of you_ , living inside your body, and you're never going to be able to trust yourself all the way. You're never going to feel all the way safe inside your own head. So you build—a support structure, a scaffolding, that can help you, that can be—a safety net, for this highwire act that you do that is _just getting through the day_ , and God: I'm so glad I have access to therapy, and meds if/when I need them (which, because I'm lucky, I mostly don't), and friends, and family; and I know that I can check myself into the hospital, and I know what I'm listening for to know when that's something I need to do. But it is still— _fucking terrifying_ , all the time, to know that there is a murderer hiding somewhere inside you, and the person it wants to kill is you.

But—you can't make that person go away by like—telling it it doesn't exist, or it's not _really_ trying to kill you: she fucking _is_ trying to kill me, which is why I need the therapy access and the friends and the hospital phone number and, yes, sometimes, the fucking meds. And again: I am so, so, _so_ fucking lucky; I've been seriously suicidally depressed... maybe three times? In my whole life? And I'm thirty-seven. But I still fucking think about things like "what's going to happen to me, when I go through menopause? because a lot of women _get more crazy_ " and "oh, shit, I moved, better update my phone bill and move my cable and _figure out where I will go, now, for help, if I wake up tomorrow and I'm suicidal_.

I pulled the title of this post from Dylan Thomas because—I think the thing that gets lost, sometimes, when we're talking about suicidal thoughts and feelings is—the thing that I'm afraid of isn't death. _I am not afraid to die_. But I _am_ afraid of killing myself because it would be a very, very small part of my brain, maybe—idk, 2%? not even, I don't think—speaking for the whole of me; and most of me wants, desperately, _furiously_ , to live. And the thing that I have felt, when I have been assaulted; when I have been abused; when I have been relentlessly told by myself and my life and my circumstances that I don't deserve love and emotional communion, because I am ________ (insert adjective[s] here); when I have been desperately, reflexively protecting a man who tried to rape me from maybe losing a friend; when I have been sad and isolated and alone, it's like—it just. Turns the volume down. On the parts of me that know how to sing and laugh and motherfucking _scream_ loudly enough to drown that very, very small <2% part of me out.

So to have the show—take this issue, and handle it _in this way, specifically_ —they're not clueless. They know what they're doing. They understand depression. They understand suicidality. They understand trauma; and if they understand all of that, then I have to believe that they understand that Quentin was abused by his ex-girlfriend and then taught not to love and then abused by his ex-boyfriend after being sexually assaulted and oh also somewhere in there his dad died and then he killed himself. That is the story they decided to tell. They told the story where like 98% of Quentin just stops fucking screaming.

And us. All of us? We are so, so fucking afraid that we are going to stop fucking screaming.

For me, the thing that makes this especially frustrating is: this is a pattern. This is, specifically, a pattern in how they've handled _Quentin_. There are so many things on this show that are Acknowledged Issues™—until they apply to Quentin. Then they're just background noise. They wrote an entire episode on the importance of enthusiastic consent (which is, by the way, a _super mediocre_ episode, so—thanks, guys, good job); within spitting distance of the episode in which Poppy first insistently kisses Quentin through him first violently pulling away, then backs him onto a bed while he's visibly shutting down down, then climbs on and continues kissing him through becoming increasingly nonverbal all the way up to (and probably through) the point where she fucks him. Not once have they textually acknowledged, or even _alluded_ to that being assault. Not once have they textually acknowledged that Mayakovsky turning Alice and Quentin into foxes wasn't super consensual, either (at least—they haven't acknowledged that it maybe wasn't super consensual for _Quentin_ ). They've had multiple episodes where choice and bodily/personal autonomy are centered and become in-text issues for other characters, and while I note that those characters basically never actually get to _exercise_ choice/experience bodily/personal autonomy, especially if they're women, they at least get to be mad about _not_ getting to exercise it after. Quentin doesn't. Quentin found himself forcibly sharing his body with a niffin who tried to burn him up from the inside and then he was possessed by a lamprey that wanted to kill his ex-girlfriend and laid eggs in his brain and not _once_ did he even get to _process_ about what those experiences took from him. 

And—this is what feels cheap, to me. This is sort of—where we cross over from "here is a character who I find highly #relatable and they're hurting him, ow" to "this is lazy fucking storytelling." Like—they've let Quentin whine about—a whole fucking ton of shit, most of it kind of trivial and self-involved; but in every way that matters, in every fucking way that Quentin is a _real person_ with _meat_ and _dimensionality_ oh and also _a profound lack of privilege_ , they have just let him down again, and again, and again, and again; and they've done it on issues that they clearly understand are issues and can clearly see and process. So—why? Why are they doing that? Why for this character? On this show? Like, Jason Ralph clearly has the acting chops to sell whatever they fucking give him—half the time I feel like he's selling stuff they haven't even _offered_ ; he's just—selling it because it makes sense for the character. And I don't have a good answer that isn't "bad, cheap writing to accomplish lazy, poorly-thought-out audience thrills," which—I am not thrilled. FYI. There's no reason to kill Quentin off, at the end of S4. It gains them nothing. If anything, if they wanted/needed to write Ralph off so he could go make some decent fucking art (which I am assuming is what's going on), it would work _better_ to do it by not killing him, and just having him move to a hut in Fillory and raise goats or whatever, because they had to do _so much fucking work_ to try and make him unresurrectable (and, FYI, he still is, that one was _never_ going to work), when just having him chose to peace out would've been—much braver, and more genuine, and more generous with the character—and all the people he avatars—than they have chosen to be.


	2. Addendum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This post was recycled for a non-fannish audience on Medium. Links and more info in this "chapter"!

Hi all,

"rage, rage" was recycled, with a great deal of help from other fans, into the following article for a non-fannish audience, published on Medium and @-tweeted to Sera Gamble, John McNamara, and Henry Alonso Myers: "[On Fannishness, Intersectionality, & a Whole Other Grab-bag of Entitled Millennial Bullshit : An open letter to Sera Gamble, John McNamara, Henry Alonso Myers, and the rest of the creative team for SyFy’s _The Magicians_](https://medium.com/@greywash/on-fannishness-privilege-and-a-whole-other-grab-bag-of-entitled-millennial-bullshit-81ea4148a6d0)."

I'm not a Twitter person basically at all, but I have been trying, probably fruitlessly, to get an acknowledgement of any kind from some combination of Gamble, McNamara, Myers, or Syfy themselves. If you want to boost it, especially if you _are_ a Twitter person and know what you're doing beyond mashing a button with a confused face going "thing? do? do thing?", that would be very much appreciated. My original tweet is [here](https://twitter.com/aka_greywash/status/1119183481836204032), but I literally care not at all if you @ me or attach my name in any way; please feel free to quote it/ref it/remix it/translate/recycle it, _whatever_ , as long as you keep the link to the Medium article, not just for the content but _especially_ for the list of signatories at the bottom. I am socially a cave troll but I think this is hugely, hugely important as an issue and I desperately, desperately want their eyes on it, and for them to know _just how many_ of us they have hurt. In that light: I note also that I am still accepting co-signatories from basically anyone who wants to put their name to it, just let me know if you want me to add your handle, either here in a comment, via PM on Tumblr, or on [the original post on Dreamwidth](https://greywash.dreamwidth.org/88692.html). 

(FWIW: it has been taking me about 12-24 hours to see people's requests for signature adds because this week is nuts, so please be patient with me. I'll reply to let you know when I've added you; if I don't let you know after about 24 hours, my apologies, I probably just missed it, please send the request again.)

Thanks to everyone who has commented and replied and enriched this since I started gettin' real mad about it on Wednesday, in all venues, but particular thanks on this one go to **templemarker** , **achray** , and **hetrez** , who were my first-line audiencers and editors for the revised/non-fannish-audience version while I stayed up all night writing it in Discord. ♥ ♥ ♥

Love,  
Gins


	3. Twitter follow-up.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was originally posted 2019.04.21 as [a Twitter essay](https://twitter.com/aka_greywash/status/1120209537330368512); I still hate Twitter!! This was in response to [Physical Kids Weekly 413](https://soundcloud.com/user-367560378/episode-413-no-better-to-be-safe-than-sorry-with-lev-grossman-and-olivia-taylor-dudley), where Lev Grossman and Olivia Taylor Dudley talked with them about the finale. The ep is great, even though I don't 100% agree with them, but I basically disagree with people for fun soooooo. The ep does, however, merit like... trigger warnings++ (all the stuff you'd expect for 4x13, only possibly more intense).

Speaking more broadly [ _N.B. I'd earlier tweeted @ Lev Grossman to thank him for a very empathetic-to-fans response in that podcast ep_ ] in response to [this ep of @physicalkidspod (which is a recommended listen!)](https://soundcloud.com/user-367560378/episode-413-no-better-to-be-safe-than-sorry-with-lev-grossman-and-olivia-taylor-dudley)... for starters, and just to get myself on record: as someone who had some pretty fucking well-documented issues with the way 4x13 ran [ https://link.medium.com/XBWkqdJP0V blah blah blah ], I do not, in fact, have a problem with (in the abstract) Quentin dying. 

I know that a lot of fans think that the death of any queer character is inherently problematic, and that this belief is currently being echoed very loudly by a group of Quentin/Eliot fans, perfectly in good faith; while I don't—think they're wrong, per se, I do think it's significant to note that for this cast and their characters, if you're talking about any single character death, you're basically talking about a queer character (Eliot, Quentin, Marina, implicitly Margo), a woman (Margo, Alice, Kady, Julia, Marina), a person of color (Margo, Penny, implicitly Kady), and/or a person whose relationship to white privilege is unstable (Josh, implicitly Kady—just to be clear, here, since this is invisible to a lot of people: Jewish people and people of Jewish descent sometimes get white privilege, and sometimes don't in some really fucking major ways), so—look. All of those are marginalized groups for whom fictional death can be problematic, especially when paired with tokenism, which I think is not, exactly, what's going on here. So it's just not useful, to me, to say "oh The Magicians cast is so diverse, you can never kill diverse characters"; the handling, however, I think can and should be discussed. 

This is also not a 'ship thing for me, and it's *definitely* not a not-liking-Alice-thing: I do write Quentin/Eliot fic (you will note that I can't be having with the portmanteau, because I am one million years old), but I love Alice, and I feel passionately attached to Quentin and Alice's relationship and their affectionate connection (I just tend not to think they're very good for each other romantically, also because I am one million years old). My favorite episodes this season were 4x5 and 4x11 for the relationships, and then 4x6 for Alice's Modesto plot. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 

It seems silly to feel the need to defend myself on any of these counts, which are not really relevant to specifically where I think 4x13 went wrong, but since they were sort of... alluded to, in @physicalkidspod's episode, I feel the need to get myself on the record. That said, I have no idea who this ep of @physicalkidspod is talking about, specifically, when the group of us who do read this as a suicide and do find the way that that was framed painful, traumatic, and offensive come up, and various opinions are sort of... assigned, either directly or allusively, to us as a group. [For the record: on this count, I think it would have been helpful for @physicalkidspod to have gotten one of the people who feels that way on tape—an awful fucking lot of us have expressed ourselves, I think pretty articulately, across these here internets—to in fact represent that perspective, but I get why that might have been a challenge.] Just to be clear, I don't feel called out or anything, since reading any of what I, personally, said on Medium [ https://link.medium.com/XBWkqdJP0V again for context] as anti-Alice or even particularly pro-Eliot/Quentin would be—a very peculiar interpretation to take; but since no one was mentioned by name on @physicalkidspod, and our perspective was not represented in this episode except indirectly—primarily by @leverus ; thank you again—I want to just get on the record that, from my perspective, as an individual mentally ill bisexual person who is mad about 4x13: Quentin dead could conceivably have been a successful ending for #TheMagiciansFinale; Quentin alive and with Alice could have been a successful ending for #TheMagiciansFinale; Quentin alive and with Eliot could've been a successful ending for #TheMagiciansFinale; Quentin alive and—crazy talk, I know—not in a relationship with *anyone* could've been a successful ending for #TheMagiciansFinale; Quentin on the show as a recurring character or a one-off guest or a hallucination in the S5 musical could've been a successful ending for #TheMagiciansFinale; Quentin retiring to a hut in Fillory to raise goats could've been a successful ending for #TheMagiciansFinale. Like many fans, I had flagged Quentin as the probable person to die in this season by 4x3; by 4x5, I had written fic about it; by 4x7, I was pretty *damn* sure it was him in the elevator. I kept watching the show. 

What a lot of us feel such anger and frustration about, and so betrayed by within this episode, is the way that death was presented as a concrete reality and not just an abstract "Quentin dies", and the way that, first, a particularly insidious, and extremely common, brand of Suicide Logic™ was recycled as a beautiful and cathartic justification for "a heroic death" for Quentin. I totally get that it doesn't read that way to everyone, including the hosts of @physicalkidspod, and I think that everyone's experiences of these issues are not identical, and can still all be valid and real and meaningful; but I want us all to be very clear about this: the particular line of thinking beginning with Penny 40 and Quentin in Penny's Secrets to the Grave office and continuing through the funeral scene—that Quentin's death has transformed his friends' lives for the better—is **so common** among suicidal people that questions about it appear on the PHQ-9 (a clinical survey used to assess suicide risk in depression patients). 

This anger and frustration that we feel is amplified by the fact that this narrative was then cast, second, in interviews, specifically by @serathegamble, @johnthemcnamara, and @alonsomyers, as a ground-breaking opportunity to permit new voices to come to the fore in genre media. To frame *this* death, of *this* character, in *this* way, was a mistake. We are objectively talking about the death of a queer character. We are objectively talking about the death of a mentally ill character. To have him die in precisely the way that queer (especially bi) characters with mental illness pretty much always die in fiction *and often destroy themselves in real life*, and then to frame that death as a privileged person stepping aside to make room for new voices, was a massive failure of artistic vision, and an incredible betrayal of fans' trust. It was deeply, deeply hurtful to a core group of fans for *precisely* the reasons they had become a core group of fans in the first place. 

Finally, I also want to be very clear that my frustration is *with the showrunners*, not only for the decision itself but also their initial tone-deaf interviews and their radio silence since, and the rest of the people who made this decision in this particular way, not any member of this wonderful cast, and especially not @OliviaDudley, who has been absolutely lovely and empathetic to all fans (also: protect @OliviaDudley on social media at all cost). [And on that note: I entirely agree that this is something that we should all be able to discuss like grown-ups. I'm incredibly disappointed to hear that there are people being bullied about this issue within fandom, in *either* direction, and *especially* infuriated at the idea that they'd go after the cast. Shape up, kids. That's *completely* unacceptable, no matter how mad you are.]

**Author's Note:**

> [Dreamwidth](https://greywash.dreamwidth.org/88692.html) | [Tumblr](https://greywash.tumblr.com/post/184268093797/rage-rage).


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